Tag Archives: Werner Herzog

It does not bespeak great wisdom to call the film The Bad Lieutenant, and I only agreed to make the film after William (Billy) Finkelstein, the screenwriter, who had seen a film of the same name from the early nineties, had given me a solemn oath that this was not a remake at all. But the film industry has its own rationale, which in this case was the speculation of some sort of franchise. I have no problem with this. Nevertheless, the pedantic branch of academia, the so called “film-studies,” in its attempt to do damage to cinema, will be ecstatic to find a small reference to that earlier film here and there, though it will fail to do the same damage that academia — in the name of literary theory — has done to poetry, which it has pushed to the brink of extinction. Cinema, so far, is more robust. I call upon the theoreticians of cinema to go after this one. Go for it, losers.

Herzog’s first short is an odd juxtaposition of footage of preening make bodybuilders and documentary images of disasters: a car crash at Le Mans, a collapsed building, American fighter jets dropping bombs. Not particularly successful (even Herzog seems to dislike it) none the less it is interesting, showing his preoccupation with the terror of the real from literally his very first foray into film.